When it first entered my thoughts to say a few words about chess and its principal exponents during the Nineteenth century, and particularly of the forty years during which I have been in the circle, any idea of inquiring or examining into, and much less of attempting to reconcile the many conflicting theories so well known to exist in regard to the early history and progress of the game, had never once occurred to me. Like many others, I was slightly acquainted with Professor Forbes' important work of 1860, in which the age of chess was fixed at about 5,000 years, and India assigned as its birthplace; and I was more or less familiar with the theories advanced as to its supposed first introduction into Europe and also into our own country. That the assumed great starting point of chess on a board of sixty-four squares (as at present used), with thirty-two figures, and played by two persons, was Persia, and that the time was during the reign of Chosroes Cosrues, or Khosrus (as it is variously written), about A.D. 540, was to the limited few who took any particular interest in the matter, considered, if not altogether absolutely free from doubt, certainly one of the best attested facts in early chess history; whilst the opinions of Sir William Jones (1763), the Rev. R. Lambe (1764), Hon. Daines Barrington (1787), F. Douce, Esq. (1793), and Sir Frederick Madden (1832), to the effect that chess first found its way into England from France after the first Crusade, at about. A.D. 1100, were, I know--although unfounded and erroneous--generally accepted as embodying the most probable theory. The circumstance which first induced me to take some additional interest in this question of chess origin, was the perusal of the lines attributed to Pope (quoted by Forbes at the foot of Chapter XII of his book), and the vague and uncertain, and I now think unreasonable date fixed for our own probable first knowledge of the game, though concurred in with tolerable unanimity by so many ancient writers among those regarded as the chief authorities on the subject.